Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 22:12:38 -0400 (EDT) From: Bill/Carolyn Pechter <pechter@shell.monmouth.com> To: paul@coil.com (Paul J. Mech) Cc: FreeBSD-questions@freebsd.org (FreeBSD-questions) Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs. Linux -- one user's opinions Message-ID: <199607260212.WAA11686@shell.monmouth.com> In-Reply-To: <31F80109.7894405F@coil.com> from "Paul J. Mech" at Jul 25, 96 07:19:37 pm
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> > Dear Sir, > > I am a *nix programmer/consultant with some 17 years experience. About a year > and a half ago, I encountered Linux and BSDI's product. As about 75% of my > work has been under Sys V and it's varients, I loaded Linux on my home systems > and have been rather pleased. At the same time, I had a customer, an Internet > provider, who was running BSDI. As their machines became loaded, they > developed execution time problems and had trouble with process that would not > die (both zombies and something stranger). I replaced their machine with a > Linux one and execution speed soared as did throughput, etc. I, perhaps > mistaken;y, judged '386 BDS's by that incident. I had a similar experience. My hardware WOULD NOT make a filesystem under FreeBSD -- but ran fine under Linux and Coherent and MSDOS. I ran Linux for about a year or two--but found keeping in sync was difficult since the distribution I started with (SLS) kind of dropped out at 99.10 or so and Slackware was packaged differently. After Linux worked so well -- I upgraded hardware and went back and found that Linux worked well under light load -- but FreeBSD seemed to be more solid structurally and run better under heavy loads and swapping. FreeBSD's networking and NFS was a lot better than earlier Linux. I run both here (mostly FreeBSD though) and I've found that they both have advantages. Linux felt snappier under light loads. FreeBSD is industrial strength Unix with great support from people who KNOW Unix. Linux is closer to SysV (my preference) but FreeBSD is a good Solid Berkeley varient. Linux supports more wierd and flaky hardware. BSD is much more of a SYSTEM package, where Linux is a Kernel surrounded by add on utilities (from different people) which are packaged differently by different vendors. FreeBSD matches up against the BSD admin methods and books on admin. Linux sometimes floats between SysV and BSD on a per-utility basis. Hope this helps. Bill
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